Endel Tulving (1927-2023).

This article presents an obituary for Endel Tulving. Tulving's educational and professional careers are summarized. His work in the field of human memory is detailed. It is noted that Tulving's look at the field of verbal learning in the late 1950s persuaded him that the dominant associative tradition missed many important aspects of human memory. His research found that at the time of retrieval, memory for the original event may be successfully reinstated only by contextual cues that interact in a complementary fashion with the specifically encoded memory trace, a process that Tulving referred to as "synergistic ecphory". He is also known for his work on memory systems. In his book, Elements of Episodic Memory published in 1983, Tulving proposed that memory for experienced events, episodic memory, should be distinguished from general knowledge of the world, semantic memory, and from procedural memory, the learned ability to perform such skilled procedures as riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument. He also proposed an evolutionary framework for these different but related systems, suggesting that simple animals show only procedural memory, more complex animals are consciously aware of their knowledge of the world, but only humans possess episodic memory-the ability to use "mental time travel" to consciously recreate past experiences and to imagine possible future events. Although known initially for his purely cognitive behavioral research, during the 1980s and 1990s, Tulving increasingly incorporated neuropsychological and neuroimaging approaches into his work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Collective overclaiming is related to collective narcissism and numeracy.

When asked to estimate how much their state or nation has contributed to history, people typically provide unreasonably large estimates, claiming that their group has contributed much more to history than nongroup members would estimate, demonstrating collective overclaiming. Why does such overclaiming occur? In the current study we examined factors that might predict collective overclaiming. Participants from 12 U.S. states estimated how much their home state contributed to U.S. history, completed measures of collective narcissism and numeracy, and rated the importance of 60 specific historical events. There was a positive relationship between collective overclaiming and collective narcissism, a negative relationship between collective overclaiming and numeracy, and a positive relationship between collective overclaiming and the importance ratings of the specific events. Together, these results indicate that overclaiming is partially and positively related to collective narcissism and negatively related to people's ability to work with numbers. We conclude that collective overclaiming is likely determined by several factors, including the availability heuristic and ego protection mechanisms, in addition to collective narcissism and relative innumeracy.

Collective remembering and future forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic: How the impact of COVID-19 affected the themes and phenomenology of global and national memories across 15 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of circumstances in which to investigate collective memory and future simulations of events reported during the onset of a potentially historic event. Between early April and late June 2020, we asked over 4,000 individuals from 15 countries across four continents to report on remarkable (a) national and (b) global events that (i) had happened since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, and (ii) they expected to happen in the future. Whereas themes of infections, lockdown, and politics dominated global and national past events in most countries, themes of economy, a second wave, and lockdown dominated future events. The themes and phenomenological characteristics of the events differed based on contextual group factors. First, across all conditions, the event themes differed to a small yet significant degree depending on the severity of the pandemic and stringency of governmental response at the national level. Second, participants reported national events as less negative and more vivid than global events, and group differences in emotional valence were largest for future events. This research demonstrates that even during the early stages of the pandemic, themes relating to its onset and course were shared across many countries, thus providing preliminary evidence for the emergence of collective memories of this event as it was occurring. Current findings provide a profile of past and future collective events from the early stages of the ongoing pandemic, and factors accounting for the consistencies and differences in event representations across 15 countries are discussed.

Who won World War II? Conflicting narratives among the allies.

World War II was a cataclysmic event that consumed people from many countries for at least 6 years. We discuss a large-scale study of how people from 11 nations remember the war, including 8 Allied and 3 Axis countries. The study showed dramatic differences in how people of the former Soviet Union and those of the other 10 countries remembered the war. Events listed by the Soviet Union were almost completely different from those in the other 10 countries. In addition, Russians (as representatives of the former Soviet Union) claimed greater responsibility in winning the war (75% of the war effort) than did people from any other nation (although the US and UK also claimed over 50% responsibility). However, when people of each country rated other countries' contributions to the war, they rated the US as having a greater impact than the former Soviet Union. Another interesting finding is that when asked why the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, most people of ten countries said it was to win the war, with the exception being people from Russia. Further, the older the person in 7 of those countries, the more they agreed with the statement that the US dropped the bombs to end the war. Our study points up the importance of national collective memory in understanding and remembering World War II and how their can be stark differences in collective memory even among allies in the war.

True-false tests enhance retention relative to rereading.

Testing with various formats enhances long-term retention of studied information; however, little is known whether true-false tests produce this benefit despite their frequent use in the classroom. We conducted four experiments to explore the retention benefits of true-false tests. College students read passages and reviewed them by answering true-false questions or by restudying correct information from the passages. They then took a criterial test 2 days later that consisted of short-answer questions (Experiments 1 and 2) or short-answer and true-false questions (Experiments 3 and 4). True-false tests enhanced retention compared to rereading correct statements and compared to typing those statements while rereading (the latter in a mini meta-analysis). Evaluating both true and false statements yielded a testing effect on short-answer criterial tests, whereas evaluating only true statements produced a testing effect on true-false criterial tests. Finally, a simple modification that asked students to correct statements they marked as false on true-false tests improved retention of those items when feedback was provided. True-false tests can be an effective and practical learning tool to improve students' retention of text material. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Can signal detection theory explain everyday amnesia (high confident misses)?

Levi et al. (2021) critique the concept of everyday amnesia (high confident misses) by arguing that these are simply due to criterion shifts within a signal detection framework. We agree that signal detection figures can be drawn to conceptualize the results, but we argue such efforts merely provide a re-description of the phenomenon without explaining it. For that, one would need a process theory. Signal detection theory represents an elegant framework for conceiving of issues in decision making, but not for explaining mechanisms underlying them. A signal detection figure can be created for any possible recognition memory result; any pair of hit rates and false alarm rates (and hence miss rates and correct rejection rates) is amenable to such a depiction. If we were to cast the issue we raised in terms of signal detection theory, we might ask: Why do some subjects place their most liberal criterion in such a way that they miss, with high confidence, items that they recently studied? Signal detection theory provides no answer.

The effect of delayed judgments of learning on retention.

Evidence is mixed concerning whether delayed judgments of learning (JOLs) enhance learning and if so, whether their benefit is similar to retrieval practice. One potential explanation for the mixed findings is the truncated search hypothesis, which states that not all delayed JOLs lead to a full-blown covert retrieval attempt. In three paired-associate learning experiments, we examined the effect of delayed JOLs on later recall by comparing them to conditions of restudy, overt retrieval, and various other delayed JOL conditions. In Experiment 1, after an initial study phase, subjects either restudied word pairs, practiced overt retrieval, or made cue-only or cue-target delayed JOLs. In Experiments 2a and 2b, where conditions were manipulated within-subjects, subjects either restudied word pairs, practiced overt retrieval, made cue-only delayed JOLs, made cue-only delayed JOLs followed by a yes/no retrieval question or, in another condition, by an overt retrieval prompt. The final cued recall tests were delayed by two days. In Experiment 1, recall after cue-only delayed JOLs did not reliably differ from recall after overt retrieval or restudy. In Experiments 2a and 2b, delayed JOLs consistently produced poorer recall relative to overt retrieval. Furthermore, reaction times for delayed JOLs were shorter relative to delayed JOLs paired with overt retrieval prompts. We conclude that only some delayed JOLs elicit covert retrieval attempts, a pattern supporting the truncated search hypothesis. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11409-021-09260-0.

Three facets of collective memory.

Collective memory refers to the memories that individuals have as members of the groups to which they belong, whether small (family, school) or large (political party, nation). Membership in some groups can form a strong part of a person's individual identity. Collective memory is history as people remember it; it is not formal history, because the "memories" of a group are often contradicted by historical fact. Although collective memory is held within individuals, it has rarely been studied by psychologists, because they have concentrated on studying the learning of individual events (such as word lists) in the laboratory or retrieving events of one's life (autobiographical memory). Three facets of collective memory are the focus of this article. First, collective memory can be a body of knowledge about a topic. However, this knowledge base may change over generations of a people. Second, collective memory often portrays an image of a people, and often this image arises from the group's origin story or charter. Third, collective memory is a process; collective remembering can reveal disputes and contestations about how the past should be remembered. One useful purpose of collective memory studies is to capture how different groups and societies remember their history and to discern their shared perspective on the world and how such perspectives differ among groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Biased collective memories and historical overclaiming: An availability heuristic account.

People tend to overclaim historical influence for their own ingroup, in a phenomenon called ingroup inflation. Although this overclaiming has been empirically demonstrated in the USA and other nations, the cognitive mechanisms underlying it have been largely conjectural. We test one such proposed mechanism: the application of the availability heuristic to a biased collective memory. Collective memories in the psychological sense are shared memories held individually by members of a group that pertain to their group identity. Using measures of retrieval fluency, we show that asymmetrical accessibility for collective memories favoring ingroup - versus outgroup - relevant historical events is correlated with overclaiming, and that reducing this asymmetry through targeted retrieval of outgroup-relevant events reduces overclaiming (Experiments 1 and 2). We also suggest that ingroup inflation arises because of retrieval fluency per se, rather than more stable asymmetries in knowledge or event-specific judgments of importance (Experiment 3). Together, these studies suggest some cognitive bases of collective overclaiming and cognitive interventions that might attenuate these biased judgments.

Identifying the guilty word: Simultaneous versus sequential lineups for DRM word lists.

Recent research in the eyewitness identification literature has investigated whether simultaneous or sequential lineups yield better discriminability. In standard eyewitness identification experiments, subjects view a mock-crime video and then are tested only once, requiring large samples for adequate power. However, there is no reason why theories of simultaneous versus sequential lineup performance cannot be tested using more traditional recognition memory tasks. In two experiments, subjects studied DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) word lists (e.g., bed, rest, tired, ...) and were tested using "lineups" in which six words were presented either simultaneously or sequentially. A studied word (e.g., tired) served as the guilty suspect in target-present lineups, unstudied related words (e.g., nap) served as fillers in target-present and target-absent lineups, and critical lures (e.g., sleep) were included in some target-present and target-absent lineups as well, to serve as attractive alternatives to the target word (or suspect). ROC analyses showed that the simultaneous test format generally yielded superior discriminability performance compared to the sequential test format, whether or not the critical lure was present in the lineup.

Recognition memory: Tulving's contributions and some new findings.

Endel Tulving has provided unparalleled contributions to the study of human memory. We consider here his contributions to the study of recognition memory and celebrate his first article on recognition, a nearly forgotten but (we argue) essential paper from 1968. We next consider his distinction between remembering and knowing, its relation to confidence, and the implications of high levels of false remembering in the DRM paradigm for using phenomenal experiences as measures of memory. We next pivot to newer work, the use of confidence accuracy characteristic plots in analyzing standard recognition memory experiments. We argue they are quite useful in such research, as they are in eyewitness research. For example, we report that even with hundreds of items, high confidence in a response indicates high accuracy, just as it does in one-item eyewitness research. Finally, we argue that amnesia (rapid forgetting) occurs in all people (not just amnesic patients) for some of their experiences. We provide evidence from three experiments revealing that subjects who fail to recognize recently studied items (miss responses) do so with high confidence 15-20% of the time. Such high confidence misses constitute our definition of everyday amnesia that can occur even in college student populations.

Competing national memories of World War II.

We assessed the knowledge of 1,338 people from 11 countries (8 former Allied and 3 former Axis) about World War II. When asked what percentage their country contributed to the war effort, across Allied countries, estimates totaled 309%, and Axis nations' estimates came to 140%. People in 4 nations claimed more than 50% responsibility for their country (Germany, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States). The overclaiming of responsibility reflected in these percentages was moderated when subjects were asked to consider the contributions of other countries; however, Russians continued to claim great responsibility, the only country that remained well over 50% in its claim of responsibility for the Allied victory. If deaths in the war are considered a proxy of a nation's contributions, the Soviet Union did carry much of the burden. This study points to sharp differences in national memory even across nations who fought on the same side in the war. Differing national perspectives shape diverse memories of the same complex event.

How we have fallen: implicit trajectories in collective temporal thought.

Memory may play a critical role in the ability to imagine events in the future. While most work on this relation has concerned episodic memory and simulated episodic events in the future, the current study examines how collective memories relate to imagination for the collective future. Two thousand American participants provided events for (1) America's origins, (2) normative events that all Americans should remember, and (3) events in America's future. Each event was rated for emotional valence. Whereas collective memories - particularly origin events - showed pronounced positivity biases, there was a negativity bias in collective future thought, indicating an implicit trajectory of decline in Americans' representations of their nation across time. Imagination for the social future may not be simulated based on the template of collective memories, but may rather relate to the past in a way that is mediated by cultural narrative schemata.

The effects of repeated lineups and delay on eyewitness identification.

A significant problem in eyewitness identification occurs when witnesses view a suspect in one venue such as a mugshot and then later in a lineup where the suspect is the only previously viewed person. Prior research has documented that the witness may select the suspect from the lineup due either to misplaced familiarity from seeing the mugshot or to their prior commitment from identifying the suspect from the mugshot. Two experiments attempted to minimize these biases by using repeated identical lineups, such that both targets and fillers were repeated, to determine if such a procedure could be useful. Across two experiments, we also varied the delay between seeing the event and the first lineup, as well as the delay between lineups. Despite the use of identical lineups, we continued to observe the effects of commitment and misplaced familiarity, so our procedure did not remove these problems. In addition, we also found that both repeated lineups and increasing delays can influence people's tendency to choose and their willingness to maintain their decisions, regardless of accuracy. Most importantly, however, despite the negative effects of repeated lineups and the relatively long delays used in our experiments, we obtained strong relations between confidence and accuracy when using confidence-accuracy characteristic plots. High confidence responses were associated with high accuracy.

Moralized memory: binding values predict inflated estimates of the group's historical influence.

Collective memories are memories or historical knowledge shared by individual group members, which shape their collective identity. Ingroup inflation, which has previously also been referred to as national narcissism or state narcissism, is the finding that group members judge their own group to have been significantly more historically influential than do people from outside the group. We examined the role of moral motivations in this biased remembering. A sample of 2118 participants, on average 42 from each state of the United States, rated their home state's contribution to U.S. history, as well as that of ten other states randomly selected. We demonstrated an ingroup inflation effect in estimates of the group's historical influence. Participants' endorsement of binding values - loyalty, authority, and sanctity, but particularly loyalty - positively predicted the size of this effect. Endorsement of individuating values - care and fairness - did not predict collective narcissism. Moral motives may shape biases in collective remembering.

The relationship between confidence and accuracy with verbal and verbal + numeric confidence scales.

Police departments often use verbal confidence measures (highly confident, somewhat confident) with a small number of values, whereas psychologists measuring the confidence-accuracy relationship typically use numeric scales with a large range of values (20-point or 100-point scales). We compared verbal and verbal + numeric confidence scales for two different lineups, using either two or four levels of confidence. We found strong confidence-accuracy relationships that were unaffected by the nature of the scale at the highest level of confidence. High confidence corresponded to high accuracy with both two- and four-level scales, and the scale type (verbal only or verbal + numeric) did not matter. Police using a simple scale of "highly confident" and "somewhat confident" can, according to our results, rest assured that high confidence indicates high accuracy on a first identification from a lineup. In addition, our two lineups differed greatly in difficulty, yet the confidence-accuracy relationship was quite strong for both lineups, although somewhat lower for the more difficult lineup.

Elizabeth Deutsch Capaldi Phillips (1945-2017).

Presents an obituary for Elizabeth Deutsch Capaldi Phillips (1945-2017). Always known as Betty, she was an important contributor to the scientific literature and a force in higher education. Beginning as an assistant professor at Purdue University in 1969, Betty rose through the ranks and served as head of the Department of Psychological Sciences (1983-1988) and assistant dean of the Graduate School (1982-1986). Academic administration suited her: After moving to the University of Florida as a professor in 1988, she was appointed provost (1996-1999). Four years later she moved to the University of Buffalo as provost (2000-2003) and subsequently subsequently was appointed vice chancellor and chief of staff at the State University of New York (2003-2006). Betty's final academic position was as provost of Arizona State University (2006-2013). Throughout her career, Betty conducted research on the psychology of eating. She published over 80 articles and chapters and edited two books (both published by the American Psychological Association). (PsycINFO Database Record

Collective Narcissism: Americans Exaggerate the Role of Their Home State in Appraising U.S. History.

Collective narcissism-a phenomenon in which individuals show excessively high regard for their own group-is ubiquitous in studies of small groups. We examined how Americans from the 50 U.S. states ( N = 2,898) remembered U.S. history by asking them, "In terms of percentage, what do you think was your home state's contribution to the history of the United States?" The mean state estimates ranged from 9% (Iowa) to 41% (Virginia), with the total contribution for all states equaling 907%, indicating strong collective narcissism. In comparison, ratings provided by nonresidents for states were much lower (but still high). Surprisingly, asking people questions about U.S. history before they made their judgment did not lower estimates. We argue that this ethnocentric bias is due to ego protection, selective memory retrieval processes involving the availability heuristic, and poor statistical reasoning. This study shows that biases that influence individual remembering also influence collective remembering.